Quotes About Poetry

It seems after so many years of chasing my childhood sweetheart I have found her hiding in the eyes of that girl behind the bike shed. I have expected for years that medicine should leak into my poetry but never dreamed that poetry might leak into my medicine in such a way. On my best days there is no separation at all between both disciplines. I feel as though I have discovered a late love and, like all of those who have, it is all the more sweet for taking so long to wander by.

Rhyming in itself is magic.

Un autor î?i stric? opera dac? o public? într-o edi?ie rev?zut?, chiar dac? din punct de vedere poetic a devenit acum mai bun?. Prima impresie e cea hot?râtoare, ?i omul e astfel alc?tuit, încât îl poti convinge de cele mai nemaipomenite lucruri; totul se lipe?te imediat de suflet, dar vai de acela care vrea sa cure?e ?i s? ?tearg? cea a fost lipit.

As to London we must console ourselves with the thought that if life outside is less poetic than it was in the days of old, inwardly its poetry is much deeper.

Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches.

I was in Paris at an English-language bookstore. I picked up a volume of Dickinson's poetry. I came back to my hotel, read 2 000 of her poems and immediately began composing in my head. I wrote down the melodies even before I got to a piano.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away...

[T]here is a harmony In autumn, and a lustre in its sky...

...his babbling, berry lips...

...poetry is not greatly concerned with what a man thinks, but with what is so imbedded in his nature that it never occurs to him to question it: not a matter of which idea he holds, but of the depth at which he holds it.

Pink-footed, sleekly white or delicate fawn, Or darlier plumed, with glossy throat where clings One soft perpetual ripple of rainbow rings, How often to your beauty our sight is drawn When back from roamings wide you suddenly dawn, A dainty turbulence of fluttering wings, And light on some brown slanted roof, like Spring's Pale showers of blossoms on an orchard lawn!...

Browsing the dim back corner Of a musty antique shop An old book of poetry fell open Gold-gilded dust filled the air Angels flew out from the pages I caught the whiff of a soul The ink seemed fresh as today Was that voices whispering? The tree of the paper still grows.

The dog may be wonderful prose, but only the cat is poetry.

...but Edward Young was a querulous old fashioned dotard...

Full many a man, both young and old, Is brought to his sarcophagus, By pouring water, icy cold, Adown his warm æsophagus.

Emily Dickinson is a good example of the visionary who sets down her little glimpses of truth or beauty in the condensed forms in which they flashed into her mind, without effort to expand and interpret, probably without the ability to do so. Her poems will never be enjoyed by a multitude of readers because she never sought to reach the many. The few who enjoy will do so by reason of the fact that they are themselves supplying all of the expansion and interpretation.

Indeed, one turns over Miss Dickinson's book with a puzzled feeling that there was poetry in her subconscious, but that it never became explicit.

There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. In modern sculpture, picture, and poetry, the beauty is miscellaneous; the artist works here and there, and at all points, adding and adding, instead of unfolding the unit of his thought.

Exaggeration! was ever any virtue attributed to a man without exaggeration? Do we not exaggerate ourselves to ourselves...? We live by exaggeration. What else is it to anticipate more than we enjoy? The lightning is an exaggeration of the light. Exaggerated history is poetry, and truth referred to a new standard. To a small man every greater is an exaggeration.

A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed onward: a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks off on the approach of human feet.

The lovely flowers embarrass me, They make me regret I am not a bee –

I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o'er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance, Tossing their heads in sprightly dance...

That a pansy is transitive, is its only pang.

Flowers rewrite soil, water, and sunshine into petal'd poetry.